Posts Tagged ‘Advertising’

Absolutely love this little bit of branding from RockStar – fits perfectly with the medium (yeah it’s a bit cliché, but as a Chinese product that goes out to a mass audience you couldn’t find much better) and the demographic (lazy gamers who can’t be arsed to cook – yeah, I said it), and I bet they didn’t pay anything for the space either – genius!

A really interesting article from the Japan times here, detailing the fairly minor (but worsening) woes of the Japanese newspaper industry. The Japanese buy more newspapers per head than almost any other nation on Earth (around 624 papers per 1000 people per day), and newspaper sales have declined by a relatively slight 3.2% over the past ten years, which in the age of the internet is fairly phenomenal. Even with these reductions in sales, Japanese newspapers seem far less suseptible to the whims of the market – the article states that only 30% of their revenue is garnered through advertising, with cover-prices encompassing most of the rest (making them, in turn, far more expensive than papers over here).

Another major reason, however, that newspaper sales are holding up so well in Japan as opposed to Britain and America is that the newspaper companies made a conscious decision a few years ago to restrict their online presence (as noted in this Marketing article here). Deloitte looked into the British newspaper market to devise possible strategies for the industry to adopt to remain profitable in the digital age, which is taken up in the article as follows –

…[a Deloitte] report offers publishers the controversial suggestion of “significantly reducing” their online activity, in an attempt to drive people back to the physical product.

To support the stance, Deloitte points to the press market in Japan, which has always restricted its online presence, and where titles have suffered lower declines in readership and advertising than its North American and European peers.

Could British newspapers shift away from online to drive print sales, especially after having invested so much money in their online presences over the past ten years? I’m sure if they all clubbed together and took their sites offline permanently then sales might rise in the short term, but the truth of it is that whilst Japanese newspapers are doing incredibly well without a significant online presence, this system just wouldn’t be sustainable for our papers because they are written in English. English is, after all, the language of the internet, with figures as to the percentage of pages online written in English ranging from 70-80%, whilst japanese comes in at around 3-4%.

So much information exists online in English that if British newspapers were to restrict their online presence British people would simply go elsewhere (aside from the obvious Wall Street Journal, the BBC, Reuters etc., Twitter, social networks, blogs and almost any other platform you can think of online can be used to find news, sometimes even more quickly than “traditional” online news sources) – Japanese papers, however, don’t have to worry about their language suddenly exploding across the world and amplifying their reader’s sources of news ten-thousandfold, so they can probably get away with restricting their online content in a way British papers can’t.

The news a fortnight ago that Culture minister Andy Burnham has rejected proposals to allow product placement in British TV has caused a fairly widespread negative reaction across the advertising world, with bloggers and columnists alike disparaging his take on the subject as short-sighted and simultaneously behind the times, and it’s not hard to see why.

The fact is that the old distribution model is weakening under the strain of digital – Clay Shirky wrote in the Guardian in January about newspapers struggling to adapt to digital and burying their heads in the sand with regard to the impact the internet is having on their distribution model (which Rory Sutherland followed up on in Campaign on Friday, although doesn’t seem to be on their website yet). The same problems face the TV industry, although in this case the real crime is that legislation like this is forcibly pushing their heads under the surface and giving them little chance to adapt, even if they wanted to.

I know it’s been around for a while now, but earlier today it struck me (in the shower, obviously) that Ducks might just be the perfect recession ad, because it manages to combine almost everything that people have been clamouring for from ads since the recession began:

1) People have been wrangling over whether to go down the branding or pricing/offer route in ads ever since the world started to fall apart – Ducks does both. It has brilliant branding, working hard to push o2 as relevant, quirky, knowingly self-deprecating and in touch with consumers, all whilst pushing an offer-based incentive.

2) It’s funny, feel-good, not gloomy in the slightest – it’s not “you’ve got no money now, so get on pay as you go”, but rather “look how fun pay as you go is, plus you can get all this cool shit!”. Plus that shot of the wide-eyed duck about to go over the waterfall is priceless.

3) Most importantly, it really pushes o2’s generosity. Generous brands are going to be the ones who come out of the other side of the recession in good shape, simply because they will have been the ones who demonstrated their commitment to their customers above all else. When things are good, yeah sure it’s easy to give away a few prizes to lure people in and reward loyalty, but when money is in short supply generosity like this means so much more. I’m not saying it’s less transparent, far from it, it might be even more so, but it’s memorable and powerful to give things to customers in lean times such as these (especially when it’s existing customers who don’t have to do anything – this is definitely a “I want to be one of them, their little club is cool” ad).

A few days ago Cadbury were running a campaign for Cadbury’s Caramel (nope, it will never be Cadbury Dairy Milk Caramel, no matter how hard they try) all over the tube – this cover for thelondonpaper was accompanied by distributers handing out free Caramels, and supported by matching posters all over the place (alongside the huge IMAX board and T/supersides on buses). This focus on reinforcement seems to correlate well with what we wrote about the power of three and the work of Dr Paul Kelley at Monkseaton High School who is pioneering a system of spaced learning.

Absolutely love this ad for Tostitos chips and dips from Goodby Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco – great choice of (British) music (not sure if the penchant for the plinky-plonky indie ad soundtrack is as prevalent in the US, but it’s nice to think that this stands out as much there as it would here), beautiful art direction, lovely and whimsical, whilst also being pretty brave from the client – smallish packshot, few visual clues as to what’s going on beforehand, and not a crisp in sight – insert hyperbole here.

a) Women! You like wine and stuff, don’t you? Having a little tipple with the girls while the men get on with the real stuff! Can’t say fairer than that can you?!

b) Women! You were pretty damn subjugated there, weren’t you, having to wash all those clothes by hand for us men, but – lucky you! – we’ve been all benevolent and bought you a washing machine! Now all you have to do is load it up, and everyone’s happy! See, with this happy invention you can save valuable time, time enough to wash some dishes perhaps!

c) Women! You’re all insecure and cute aren’t you?! Having all those issues about your bodies, no idea where they all come from, but don’t worry, you can get away from all that by dimming the lights a little! Nothing like a bit of darkness to cover that aching desire to be thin. Even better, when the lights are off, he might actually think your fat arse is sexy, and deign not to think about Kelly Brook the next time he’s shagging you – it’s win-win!

Just remember ladies, these are all great inventions for you, and we, those proud men who created them, should be foremost in your thoughts the next time you think of designing something – why bother, when someone better can do it for you?! Put your feet up and relax, read the paper, just don’t forget the dinner…

This Nike mural is easily one of the most awesome ads I’ve ever seen, I just hope no-one ever paints over it. Art and advertising hardly ever come together this seamlessly nowadays, and it would be amazing to see more of it (although obviously it’s all about context, if this wasn’t in the east of the city, surrounded by countless other bits of graffiti, it probably would have been removed). The rest of the city was littered with all sorts of assorted coolness…

This new, and rather ambitious, campaign for Lexus, based on the anti-vibration technology of their flagship model, the ES, dropped online a few days ago –

It’s all rather nice – the plinky-plonky soundtrack smacks of concentration and precision, and the idea demonstrates the car’s technology extremely impressively. The only thing is, and it’s a pretty big thing…